Documenting Chaos

It has surely been chaotic around the office lately!  I’ve been assisting with migrations on the healthcare side for companies using Misys EMR/Misys Tiger to Allscripts ProEHR and ProPM.

Making the change involves a LOT of work.  From the obvious software setup to hardware setup down to ActiveDirectory permissions on the new systems, user training, helpdesk support, etc.

This leaves me little time to document the process of installing and configuring systems.

Between a notepad with scribbled technobabble and a few dozen text documents floating around my desktop, USB drive, and sticky notes, things get confusing — fast!  The worst part is that the entire team depends on me to “show them the light”.  What once took me 2-3 hours to setup a single system, I now have down to less than 30 minutes from start to finish.

Today, I’m working on documentation.  I’ve used so many different tools to help me document things on the fly — Wiki on a Stick, text editors, voice notes, etc.  Probably the best tool so far that I’ve found is “The Guide”.  This is an invaluable piece of software, which is free I might add.

Check out “The Guide” at the SourceForge project page:  http://theguide.sourceforge.net/

Off to documenting…

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